The next NASA Mars rover will hunt for signs of ancient life in what used to be a river delta, the agency announced on November 19.

The rover is expected to launch in July 2020 and to land on Mars around February 18, 2021. It will seek out signs of past life in the sediments and sands of Jezero crater, which was once home to a 250-meter-deep lake and a river delta that flowed into the...

The next spacecraft set to land on Mars is bringing its own communications team. InSight, a lander scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet on November 26, is accompanied by a pair of briefcase-sized spacecraft that will send details of the landing to Earth in almost real time.

The twin craft on this mission are CubeSats — tiny, inexpensive satellites that are easy to build and launch....

Meet the Kordylewski dust clouds, shimmering pseudo-satellites that orbit Earth near the moon. A team of Hungarian astronomers say they have spotted light scattered from one of these clouds, providing evidence that the clouds really exist after nearly 60 years of controversy.

The twin dust clouds gather at two of the points in space where the gravity of Earth and the moon cancel each...

China is about to make space history. In December, the country will launch the first spacecraft ever to land on the farside of the moon. Another craft, slated for takeoff in 2019, will be the first to bring lunar rocks back to Earth since 1976.

These two missions — the latest in China’s lunar exploration series named after the Chinese moon goddess, Chang’e — are at the forefront of...

A thick sphere of icy debris known as the Oort cloud shrouds the solar system. Other star systems may harbor similar icy reservoirs, and those clouds may be visible in the universe’s oldest light, researchers report.

Astronomer Eric Baxter of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues looked for evidence of such exo-Oort clouds in maps of the cosmic microwave background, the cool...

The NASA spacecraft that was the first to orbit two worlds in one mission has sent its final messages back to Earth, mission managers announced November 1.

The spacecraft missed two check-ins with NASA’s Deep Space Network on October 31 and November 1, scientists say. That silence likely means Dawn ran out of the hydrazine that fuels its thrusters, which help...

Saturn’s moon Dione is streaked with long bright stripes, and no one knows how they got there.

Planetary scientists first noticed the stripes in pictures taken with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017 (SN: 4/14/18, p. 6). Found near the moon’s equator, the long, thin, bright lines run surprisingly parallel to each other for tens to hundreds of kilometers....

The “ring rain” of material falling from Saturn’s rings into the planet’s atmosphere is a much more intense, contaminated downpour than scientists thought.

For decades, astronomers have suspected that Saturn’s rings pelt the planet with grains of water ice, but some of the final observations from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft provide the first detailed views of these celestial showers (SN: 4...